Reduced congruency effects after a preceding incongruent trial suggest a conflict-monitoring process, which reactively triggers the recruitment of attentional control in subsequent trials. In the present study, we assessed this sequential modulation of crossmodal congruency effects separately in two different tasks. Participants performed a location judgment task and a numerical judgment task in a block-wise fashion in a modality-switching paradigm. Stimuli were presented simultaneously in two modalities and were either congruent or incongruent (e.g., left visual object, right sound) with each other. The target modality was indicated by a cue, so that the target modalities either repeated or switched in successive trials. For both tasks, the results indicated reduced congruency effects after an incongruent trial only for modality repetitions, but not for switches. This finding suggests that modality switches induce a shift in episodic context, which in turn leads to an attentional reset. This reset eliminates the sequential modulation of congruency effects.Keywords Conflict adaptation . Attentional state . Attentional reset . Modality switching Conflicts arise at many processing levels throughout perception and action, influencing the efficiency of our actions. A predominant idea of how our cognitive system deals with such conflicts refers to the existence of a conflict-monitoring system (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001). Whenever conflict is detected and evaluated by this system, reactively adapted mechanisms of cognitive control increase processing selectivity (i.e., selective attention) so that conflict is reduced in subsequent processing episodes. For example, attentional biasing of task-relevant aspects is strengthened and task-irrelevant aspects have less influence, resulting in improved performance (Egner, 2007).Conflicts can be induced experimentally by providing incongruent stimulus information. For example, in the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935), participants are supposed to indicate the font color of written color words. In congruent trials, the word Bred^is also displayed in red, and Bred^is the correct answer, whereas in incongruent trials, the word Bred^might be displayed in blue (with Bblue^as the correct answer). Here, conflict arises between the automatically read color word and the to-be-named font color. Performance is usually better in congruent (no-conflict) than in incongruent (conflict) trials, termed the congruency effect.

According to the ideomotor principle, action preparation involves the activation of associations between actions and their effects. However, there is only sparse research on the role of action effects in saccade control. Here, participants responded to lateralized auditory stimuli with spatially compatible saccades toward peripheral targets (e.g., a rhombus in the left hemifield and a square in the right hemifield). Prior to the imperative auditory stimulus (e.g., a left tone), an irrelevant central visual stimulus was presented that was congruent (e.g., a rhombus), incongruent (e.g., a square), or unrelated (e.g., a circle) to the peripheral saccade target (i.e., the visual effect of the saccade). Saccade targets were present throughout a trial (Experiment 1) or appeared after saccade initiation (Experiment 2). Results showed shorter response times and fewer errors in congruent (vs. incongruent) conditions, suggesting that associations between oculomotor actions and their visual effects play an important role in saccade control.

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